REFORM ON CULTURAL POLICY AND ITS EFFECTS ON MUSIC PRACTICE AND PERCEPTION IN RURAL UKRAINE

Dr. William Noll is academic coordinator and research associate at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He is an ethnomusicologist specializing in folk and village music. Not of Ukrainian descent, he learned Ukrainian at Harvard and has conducted extensive village-based research in Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, and Slovakia. His research interests include the repression of musicians and musicologists in the Soviet period.

He has recently authored several articles on Ukrainian music in ethnographic and general publications appearing in Kiev and Lviv. A recent publication appearing in North America is: “Music Institutions and National Consciousness Among Polish and Ukrainian Peasants” in Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, S. Blum et al, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Dr. Noll heads efforts at the Ukrainian Research Institute to study and document changes in the development of Ukrainian village culture, folk music and rural traditions. He instituted a conservation program, affiliated with the Library of Congress in Washington, to preserve turn-of-the-century wax cylinder recordings of music and voice obtained from archives and repositories in Kiev.

The text that follows is part of a conference paper that Dr. Noll delivered in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in October.

The events of the last few weeks have altered somewhat the paper that I prepared 10 months ago. As originally written, it was based on research carried out in Ukraine in academic year 1989-1990 on an IREX grant, and discussed the effects of recent reforms in village culture.

However, today the Soviet Union does not exist, while Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms are largely part of the past. Over the last year I have made four subsequent trips to Ukraine. I just returned one week ago from a two-month research trip in the Ukrainian Carpathians where I taped material for a documentary video on highland village musicians.

Based on this year’s research, a revision of the thesis is in order. I originally stated that the Gorbachev period reforms had little effect on the practice of village music. In 1989 this was still true for most regions. However, by September of 1991 a very different situation existed in all regions, and a virtual culture revolution was beginning in some regions.

I discuss here the context of music practice and its perception among village populations, and point out those practices that were part of the large-scale reforms of the 1930s carried out by the Communist Party. An understanding of the music and culture of Ukraine or any other part of the former Soviet Union is difficult, I think, without a discussion of the proscriptions and prescriptions of the 1920s and especially the 1930s. After this section, I briefly outline some of today’s changes in music practice and perception in the Ukrainian countryside and discuss some of the possibilities that lave recently arisen for researchers of rural music in the lands of the former Soviet Union.

Soviet music competitions

Music contexts in Soviet lands up to 1989 or so differed somewhat from those in other areas of Eastern Europe — that is, in Bulgaria, or Poland, or Czecho-Slovakia. Of course, in all areas musicians performed at weddings and other private occasions. For public occasions, however, in the USSR until the early 1970s, village music did not exist as an element in music festivals. No festivals of real village music existed until the early 1970s, and even then they were rare. In Ukraine there were not any such festivals until 1990.

Instead, between 1931 and the 1970s there were a series of so-called “music olympics.” Here there were layers of participation: the first layer was on a village or regional level, the next was on a republican level, and the third was on a union-wide level, taking place always in Moscow. These were strictly competitions, with chosen winners going on to the next level of participation.

Real village musicians were heard only at the first, the village level, and then their repertory and its content were strictly controlled to exclude all forbidden subjects, such as religion, national consciousness, or mention of repressed or purged people. Village musicians rarely were chosen to go on to the next level, the republican competitions, and virtually never went on to the union level competitions in Moscow.

The judges in all cases were party officials and other authorities of the state. As representatives of Soviet culture, they typically chose music ensembles with highly stylized repertories, such as an ensemble consisting of various urban-based musical instruments from various republics in the union, indiscriminately bunched together. The judges also would typically choose a choir of a small-town police force, or an ensemble of accordians played by army professionals, or other examples of kitsch.

The point is that the kinds of regional festivals and competitions that were and still are common in other lands of Eastern Europe did not exist in the USSR. The music of public performance was strictly controlled and was designed to conform to the image of a Leninist society. The music olympics featured a Soviet music, one that arose and existed to serve state interests.

The village clubs

Another kind of public music in the village could be heard at the village club. This building was part of an immense network of village institutions that was slowly built over a 30-year period. The club was a kind of community center in which state holidays were celebrated and where Soviet elections took place. The clubs were in great demand in villages and in some regions, villagers were without clubs until the 1950s. The demand largely stemmed from the fact that movies were shown there, and Saturday night dances were also a feature. Both activities were desired by especially village youth. All except the smallest clubs had a stage.

About every six weeks there was a Soviet state holiday that was celebrated in the village club. For these as well as for Communist Party elections, the local village musicians were required to perform. A choir of girls and boys or of village women would begin a holiday concert in the club with a selection of official songs — without exception with texts in praise of Lenin, or before 1953 about Stalin, or alternately about the party.

The village instrumental musicians were obligated to perform at the club in concert for virtually all Soviet state holidays as well as for party elections. Refusing to do so could mean trouble for them. A local party official could (and I know of instances where this happened) threaten to take a musician’s home away from him for refusing to perform at the official gatherings. A musician and his family could be repressed in a variety of ways. In short, the village instrumental musician performed when he was ordered to do so by the local party officials. He did not have to greatly alter his repertory, and he did not have to change his style. He did have to add to his repertory those official songs of state that were heard at every state concert in the club – songs in praise of Lenin, the party, the army and the like, often as accompaniment to the choir.

In a few regions, the local musicians were organized into large ensembles of “folk music instruments” — a potpourri of musical instruments from several republics in the Soviet Union. They-performed published arrangements of a Soviet repertory that was written and built-up over the last 70 years, but especially in the 1930s to the 1950s. Little of this music bore any relation to the village music that existed in pre-Soviet times, or for that matter that continued to exist in the village throughout the Soviet period.

This “official folk music” was a part of the administration of the village. The administration, including the music, was controlled from urban areas. Virtually all mass song composers and administrators of expressive culture lived and worked in urban areas from which their product was distributed throughout the countryside.

This kind of practice was based on what can be called traditionalism: a heavy reliance on the concept of tradition, here a Soviet tradition invented and distributed by administrative means. It portrays a music product through a false image — as an organic practice that continues a long-standing music, only in modified form.

This false image is best known through the performance of large song and dance troupes that are well received both in Ukraine and among the diaspora in the West. Such troupes issue recordings of highly stylized arrangements that Ukrainians virtually everywhere think of as their folk music. In fact, such performances are based more on the fantasies of urban administrators ana music professionals than upon genuine rural music practices.

Because this kind of public performance was extremely rare (or non-existent) as a village event before collectivization and the advent of Soviet power, one cannot speak of it as a proscriptive practice. Rather public performance in the village is perhaps best described as prescriptive in character.

However, the other side of musical life in the village — private performance — is perhaps best described under Soviet power as being partially proscriptive in character. That is, a longstanding performance practice was administratively altered by organs of the state. The alteration was to forbid the performance of certain genres, or to denounce as subversive aspects of. certain performance practices.

In 1989 collective farms still existed as integral units of a pan-union economy and administration. Party cadres ruled the collectives, much as they had since the early 1930s when the collectivization of agriculture was put into practice. Most villagers worked at least part of the time for the local collective — the vast majority as laborers, but a few others as drivers or office clerks.

Members of many families sought other kinds of part-time work, away from the collective, in order to diversify the income of the family household. Since the late 1950s, each household had been allowed at least one-third of a hectare of land — about two-thirds of an acre — to use as the individual peasant household saw fit; basically a garden that was intensively cultivated. They were allowed to keep a few domesticated animals, the kind and number of these depending upon the region.

All members of the peasant household worked the land dedicated to private use — that two-thirds of an acre — and the individual members of the household ideally worked a variety of jobs. Because the socialist economy was only partially based on cash, while the rest was based on barter of services or goods, having a household with a diversified labor portfolio was of great use. Each person in the family would be in a position to bring to the household goods or services that the other family members did not have access to.

Tax on music

Village musicians after the 1930s did not bring to their families much in the way of tradable services or goods. They brought cash. Before collectivization they typically brought home a variety of foods in addition to cash in payment for their services at weddings and the like. After collectivization, music became an almost exclusively cash-based activity with fewer or no goods or services traded. Because of this, the musicians were in a vulnerable position. They did not have the same degree of bartering power as others.

In the 1930s, the state began to impose taxes on the musicians’ earnings, most of which came from their participation in the village wedding sequence. The tax on their earnings worked like this: while the musician were performing at a wedding, an official of the local party organization entered the wedding home and demanded a percentage of the collected earnings of all the musicians — generally from 30 percent to as much as 60 percent, depending upon the region and time period. The tax in some cases was so high a number of musicians told me that they ceased to perform, some permanently, others for a few years until the local officials stopped collecting the music tax. It had become of little use to the musicians to perform for so little money. This music tax currently does not exist anywhere in Ukraine, and has not for at least 15 years.

by Dr. William Noll

CONCLUSION

The most obvious proscription effected by the Soviet regime, was of certain genres or specific texts and associated music. Christmas caroling — singing the koliadky — was not allowed in most regions until about two years ago. There was never an official injunction against the practice, and it never totally died out. Rather local party officials would visit the home of any defiant caroler — of any age, young or old — and suggest that it would be wiser for that person to stop the activity, that the activity of caroling was “unnecessary” and “dangerous.”

The meaning was clear: for Christmas carolers there would be no promotions at work, no help when needed, no special privileges, their children would not receive an education more than the minimum. In some cases they and/or their spouse could even be fired from work. Many other music-related activities were similarly treated by village party officials, including the carnival songs after the New Year, the hymns of the Epiphany, Easter songs, and all activities associated with the name days of saints.

In addition, since the 1930s the many wedding texts with religious meaning or reference were left out of the two- to three-day wedding sequence. This affected at least one-third of the wedding texts that were common before collectivization. Including these texts during your daughter’s or son’s wedding could bring the wrath of officialdom onto your head in the way described earlier.

Again, there were no laws, no official sanctions against such music practices. The proscription was administrative in nature and’ not based on law, but everyone on both sides knew the rules just as surely as if the proscription had been written out, published and distributed as a legal act.

One of the applications of this data for ethnomusicologists and researchers of rural culture is to inform us of the nature of the historical present. That is, one can commonly find in journal articles and scholarly books the notion that the past is contained in the present

—  that the diachronic is a part of the synchronic. And yet this is often not at all true. The great filters that exist in and around all music culture are prone to dissolve or obliterate certain, albeit selected, aspects of a music culture. Through time, it can happen that whole sections of a music fall from practice and later generations do not even known that those sections ever existed.

The great filter of Stalinism has so altered the music practices of the Ukrainian countryside, that many villagers are unaware of certain aspects of the cultural history of their grandparents or even their parents. These are not immigrants to another land nor migrants to the city, but people living in the same place as their ancestors, whose parents were instructed to forget, or at least to ignore, much of the music practice of their youth or of their own parents.

This desuetude was by and large not officially recognized in publications by Soviet researchers until recently. The desuetude of the music of two generations ago could not be acknowledged by researchers until the Gorbachev period. But by 1989, many articles and books had been written on subjects that only two or three years earlier had been forbidden.

Fate of Kobzari

One of the most dramatic examples of the desuetude that is official in Soviet cultural history concerns the fate of the Ukrainian minstrels known as kobzari and lirnyky. These were blind musicians who in autumn and winter months traveled through villages from bazaar to bazaar singing religious songs as well as the epic poetry known as dumy, and performing on one of two instruments, the kobza (a kind of plucked lute) or the lira (a hurdy gurdy).

Research conducted in the first decade of the 20th century shows that these musicians numbered in the thousands at that time. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s they were systematically arrested. About 230 of the cream of the minstrels were executed near Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine in 1934 when the NKVD staged a bogus conference on their behalf, then arrested them all. By the early 1950s there was only a handful of the blind village minstrels left. Today there are none.

There is no history or extensive research concerning these musicians that mentions how in the Stalinist period they almost all disappeared into the gulag. I have interviewed family members — wives, brothers, sisters – who tell of the arrest or disappearance of these musicians. A few articles have appeared in the Ukrainian press over the last two years that detail their fate in a general way, Research on this subject is continuing.

Collapse of Soviet administration

Traditionalism and desuetude are two of the negative aspects of the prescription and proscription of music practice under Soviet power, largely a result of administrative, norms created in the Stalinist period. Music practice under such circumstances is viewed by officialdom as part of the administrative prerogative of the state. But what happens when that state ceases to exist? What happens to the music practice when the administrative prerogative is no longer recognized and the administrative norms no longer function?

It is of course too early in the game to make any definitive statements. In western Ukraine, the former rural administration collapsed about a year ago. In central and eastern Ukraine it began collapsing only a few weeks ago.

Based on what has happened over the last year in western Ukraine certain broad trends can be tentatively identified. First of all, the farming collectives in some regions are being abandoned. Throughout western Ukraine all that is left of many such collectives is scattered debris and rusting hulks of the huge enterprises of the past. This does not mean that no one is working the land, but that the land of the collective is being worked differently. Labor relations have changed.

I do not know what the fate of these lands will ultimately be, but it is certain that the power of officialdom has been broken and the threat of losing a job on the collective farm no longer exists for those who sing a certain song or recite a given text. Christmas carolers are commonplace.

There is a reawakened interest among the young in the regional and local music practices of the pre-collectivization period. In the Carpathians, it has become fashionable among the village youth to take up the regional peasant arts and crafts. Music ensembles of teenagers perform the music of their parents and grandparents with a self-conscious zeal.

Young men and women are staging lavish wedding ceremonies in the regional style. Until recently, these hutsulski weddings were declining in favor of the panski or “gentleman’s” weddings (basically, urban style). Today the regional weddings are fast becoming the new norm among village youth. Significantly, however, the religious texts and associated melodies of the wedding sequence do not seem to be a part of the revival.

With regard to the public music of the village club, it has virtually ceased to exist. All music practices associated with Lenin, the party, the Soviet state itself are no longer performed. The Soviet holidays are not celebrated. The elections are handled by local, non-Communist officials, and village musicians are not required to perform.

Re-emergence of music traditions

In short, much that was proscribed (i.e., the regional, older music practices) has re-emerged while much that was prescribed (i.e. Soviet music practice) has immediately ceased to exist, virtually from one day to the next in a given locale.

However, there are older music practices which one can already see, will not survive the great filter of Stalinism. The just mentioned religious music and texts of the wedding sequence are one such practice. It was a complicated affair, and once defunct might not be revivable. The music of the blind minstrels is another such practice.

It does not survive because the performers no longer exist. A revival is taking place among a few urban youths, but it is being practiced by only a handful of people, none of whom live or work in the village. The music of urban bandura choirs and conservatory-trained professionals is stylistically far removed from the music practices of the blind rural minstrels of the past.

The much-talked-about economic reform in the lands of the former Soviet Union will likely take many years to be put into place. However, the rate of change with regard to village culture in Ukraine is remarkable. The villages in some regions are transforming very rapidly, and they are doing so largely without the aid of government administrators. In fact, the transformation can be said to be taking place precisely because rural cultural administration is weak and the institutions of civil society can, re-emerge unencumbered by the whims of urban administrators who rarely understand the cultural norms of the village.

But the transformation is far more complex than I am able to discuss here, and I have only briefly outlined what seems to be an organic cultural revolution in the Ukrainian countryside today.